Love your little super hero on your adorable card, such a great sketch!

You’ve won the blog candy I offered during the blog hop! I’ll be sending you an email shortly. While I wait for you to reply with your mailing address, I’ll be stuffing a padded Priority Mail Flat Rate envelope full of crafting goodies for you. There will be at least one stamp set, some brads, some designer papers, a roll of ribbon, and whatever else I can fit in the envelope.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by during the blog hop, whether or not you left a comment!

So cute and what great coloring! This little bunny with his arms full of love is perfection!

You’ve won the blog candy I offered during the blog hop! Your prize will consist of two stamp sets from My Favorite Things – “Flopsey Goes Camping” and “Flopsey Flies a Kite”, as well as some Jolee’s Boutique patriotic stickers.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by during the blog hop, whether or not you left a comment!

I have some fun stuff to talk about today! My WordPress dashboard provides me with various statistics on my blog, and I’m getting very close to having 2500 viewer comments! Wow! So as a thank you to the people who read my blog and take the time to comment, I’ve decided to give some crafting goodies to the person who leaves comment #2500.

One lucky person will receive the brand-new, never used items shown in the photo above:

1 Basic Grey “Nordic Holiday” 6″ x 6″ paper pad

1 package of Basic Grey buttons and brads that coordinate with the Nordic Holiday paper pad

1 package of Basic Grey undressed Mini Monos chipboard stickers – this is a full set of the letters of the alphabet, including extra vowels and commonly used letters, numbers, and various punctuation symbols. These are pretty big – the letter “e” shown in the photo measures 1 3/8″ tall.

I have another Nordic Holiday paper pad for my own use, and papers from it are shown on these two cards. Please note that these cards are NOT part of the blog candy giveaway.

All you have to do to win is be the person who leaves comment #2500! However, to keep things fair, I do have to impose a few rules:

Limit of TWO comments per person, please, until the winner is announced. Comments must be left on two different blog posts. (After I announce the winner, you are more than welcome to comment all you want! )

Comments must be left on blog posts going forward from this one. Any comments left on this post, and any new comments on previous posts, will be subtracted from the overall post count and will not count toward the 2500 number. This post is being “stickied” to the top of my blog’s home page until the winner is announced, so new posts will appear below it… check the date in the top left corner of each post!

Spammers are NOT eligible to win this prize. Spam Karma (the spam blocking program I use) and I will determine whether or not a comment is legitimate.

Does that sound good to you? If it does, be sure to leave your email address in the comment form so I will have a way to contact you if you’re the winner! Good luck, everyone!

Hi there… I just wanted to apologize for the lack of posts over the last week. I’ve been trying out some new themes, changing up the appearance and such here, and haven’t been spending as much time creating as I would like. Hopefully next week I’ll have some new stuff to share with you!

“Cute! And as a military wife, let me say thank you for donating your creations to OWH!”

Erika put a link to a blog in the information section of the comment form, so I clicked on that to see if I’d visited her blog during the blog hop. No, I hadn’t – she has a personal blog rather than a papercrafting one. But what I read got me feeling verklempt. I emailed her, and she responded, giving me permission to share what she’d written on her blog. Erika’s husband has been reassigned to a post overseas, so the two of them and their young daughter will have to move away from the States for about 4 years. While they are overseas, Erika expects her husband to be deployed 3 or 4 times. Erika shared her mixed emotions about moving, being away from her parents, her siblings and their families, and the likelihood of needing to find new homes for their pets.

I’ve always lived in Virginia. Even though I grew up very close to an Army base and knew lots of Army kids while I was in school, I can’t fully imagine what it’s like to be uprooted every few years. Being in a foreign country sounds like an exciting opportunity at first, but the idea of being a single mom for a while with no available support from extended family, while in a foreign country, is (in my opinion) a little scary.

And that’s why I am so glad and willing to make cards for Operation Write Home – to show support for families like Erika’s. To thank them for the sacrifices they make in their personal lives, being separated from spouses, children, extended family and friends. To thank the ones being deployed for defending our country and trying to make things better in lands far away, and to thank the ones staying at home for their efforts to keep things as “normal” as possible.

I thought I’d share something different than cards in today’s post. My younger son helped me decorate some tins for end of the year gifts for his teachers and classroom aides. He chose the style and size of tin and the designer paper used for each recipient, and I covered the tins.

First, this is the tin given to his homeroom teacher, who taught him Math, Reading, Word Study, and Social Studies. It’s just a “normal” Provo Craft rectangular tin, covered with papers from Stampin’ Up’s retired Porcelain Prints designer series paper. I used SU’s Blue Bayou ribbon and some Prima flowers to embellish it, and added some tiny crystals to the centers of the Primas. Tucking the ends of the ribbon inside the silver hardware on the front was more of a faff than I’d anticipated it to be and the end result was a little messy looking, but I was crunched for time so it had to do.

My son gave the next two tins to his Science and Language Arts teachers. Both tins are approximately 8″ x 6″ x 3″.

Once again, my son chose retired Stampin’ Up designer papers – Bali Breeze for the tin on the left, Petals & Paisleys for the tin on the right. The shape of these made them super easy to cover. I used a corner rounder on the pieces for the lids. The hard part (because there’s always a difficult part, isn’t there?) was that the papers were 12″ long, and the tins were about 28″ around, so I had to do some additional piecing on the sides.

These two tins were for two classroom aides. These measured about 5″ x 3″ x 1″ and ended up really cute, if I say so myself. The one on the left was covered with paper from Basic Grey’s Oh Baby! Boy collection, and the one on the right shows off two designs from Stampin’ Up’s Tea Party designer papers. My mini corner rounder was the perfect size to finish off the papers on the tops of these tins.

So, there they are… five tins for five teachers. My son wrote a little note to thank each teacher, and I adhered the notes to the bottoms of the tins. I don’t know if they’ll see this post, but I hope they know I appreciate all they did to make this a really good school year.

I haven’t done much creating the last few days. Saturday my husband was sweet enough to let me “take the afternoon off” and go to A.C. Moore, one of the chain craft stores. That may not sound like much at first, so let me explain… the closest A.C. Moore is about 85 miles away, or about a 90 to 100 minute drive. Google Maps gave me one set of directions and Mapquest gave a different route. So I decided to take the Google route there, and the Mapquest route home. The Google route was more scenic, but the Mapquest route seemed faster.

I’m lucky to live in a quite picturesque part of my state, in between two mountain ranges. I had to travel over one mountain range to get to the store and home again. The route there took me over the mountain on a two-lane state route which was really twisty and curvy, but well worth the trip if you love mountain scenery like I do. Part of the road followed the James River, and I was able to stop and take the following photo. I apologize if the quality isn’t very good but the only camera I had with me was the one installed on my cell phone.

Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t do justice in showing just how blue the sky was, or how yellow the wildflowers in the foreground are. But it was a beautiful view and a gorgeous day, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to capture it.

Perhaps you’ve noticed those little rectangular “Box Tops for Education” coupons on some of the products you buy. They’re on many things, such as General Mills cereals, Betty Crocker frostings and brownie mixes, Pillsbury refrigerated cookie and bread dough, Kleenex tissues, Ziploc bags, even Huggies diapers!

Our local elementary school collects them, and I’m in charge of getting them ready to send to General Mills. We receive 10 cents for each one redeemed, and General Mills sends us a check for the amount we earn.

I’m very proud to say our little-ish school of just under 400 students has earned over $1000.00 for each of the last three school years. I’ve even more proud to report that last year we earned more than any other participating school in our county. (The year before I became the Box Tops coordinator, we earned just $550.00.)

This year, we’re on track to earn $1500.00. Lately I’ve been working on counting the Box Tops we’ve received this month, because the Box Tops school year ends February 28. So I need to mail them off no later than Saturday!

And there you have it… that’s why I’ve been only thinking of inking the last several days.

Yes, that’s the name of one of the really cool Basic Grey paper collections that I like a whole lot. But it’s also what I’ve been doing since my friend Joyclynn at paper… scissors… ROCK! nominated me for the Kreativ Blogger award. Thank you, J! I’m very flattered.

The “official rules” of the award are:

1. put the logo on your blog (if you choose)
2. put a link to the person that sent you the award
3. nominate 5 blogs
4. put links to their blogs
5. leave messages for your nominees

I’ll be honest. I know some of my friends who have been blogging for a while have already received some blogger awards, but I’m not sure whether or not it was this one. So, if you’re listed in my blogroll, please consider yourself one of my nominees. I love all of you and your work!

I do want to give special attention to two of my blogroll peeps. They both started blogging about the same time I did. Nadine at Stampin’ in a Tropical Paradise does a fabulous job of coloring images, whether she’s using her Prismacolor pencils with odorless mineral spirits or her Copic markers. Lois at My Stampin’ Place is just an all-around terrific crafter and I wish I had her talent for tying bows. I am lucky enough to have received cards from both of these women, so I can base my opinions of their actual work and not just photographs. They both are awesome!

Be sure to check out Joyclynn’s blog, too. She has some really cute cards on there!

I am fortunate to have received free and/or discounted products in the past from Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps for promotional purposes.
Although I frequently mention various other companies and websites, I have received no compensation from them in any form for using their products, unless specifically noted.